🔥Welcome to Volume #00086!🔥
I’m Christian Champ. This is ☯️The Middle Way Newsletter ☯️. It is a place where I write, explore, share, and invite you along for the journey.
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🥊Why We Need to Find our Sparring Partners 🥊
After a session with a client, he felt amazed at what we discovered.
A magical moment occurred as he verbalized ideas that percolated yet remained unsaid.
A relief and a realization took place as his stream of consciousness formed into a coherent idea and plan.
A deeper yes sprung from the conversation, leading to new ideas and roads. The drips of the first couple of raindrops lead to a downpouring of potential.
To get here, we sat in a container of openness and exploration. We found a road forward to name the desired conditions and help create them.
That is the power of working with sparring partners.
They help us see the world differently and approach old problems from different angles.
Sparring partners bring out the best in us and help us live our best lives.
When we are lucky, we find these partners at school, on the job, or in other places where we train and gather.
We want multiple sparring partners to match them up with what we train for and what we attempt to accomplish. We find different partners for different projects.
They show up as colleagues, coaches, teachers, mentors, and wise elders: the more partners, the more possibilities.
Like at the Dojo, the different skill levels of sparring partners, the more skills we get to develop.
What to look for in a sparring partner?
1/ Do they walk the talk?
We want sparring partners that do what they say they do. They take actions that inspire and light fires under us.
2/ Do they show up for the greater good?
We want partners that play multiplayer games instead of only single-player games.
They show up not only for themselves but for their training partners and the community. They show up to co-create.
3/ Do we trust them?
When we spar, we put ourselves in compromising positions. We need partners we trust to treat us with respect and care.
They create eustress for us. The pressures are in service of our greater good.
4/ Can we learn from them?
Our sparring partners create virtuous feedback loops because they teach us, and we teach them.
We tend to think about where we want to go as a solo journey. When we add sparring partners, we get people helping us along the way and making sure we know where we want to go.
The journey becomes more accessible and enjoyable when adding partners, coaches, or trainers.
We accomplish more when we create collaborative competition.
Go and Find Folks to Spar With
Who are your current sparring partners? Do you need new partners? Do you need to level up your sparring game?
If anyone is looking for new sparring partners, please reach out.
📓Things to Think About📓
Andreas Klinger on Managing People
“Manging people” is one of the most misused terms. We don’t manage people, we lead them and help guide them.
We manage processes that support the team’s workflow, the ability to change it, and people’s careers and learning.
You manage processes; you lead people
I think it roots in a misunderstanding of what the role of a manager is:
your job is not to manage people
but to manage processes and lead people
You manage processes on how you expect work to be done, where each person's authority starts and ends, how their careers are made, and how all this can be discussed, and/or changed
Additionally, you are leading people by example and through empathy.
They have goals, fears and motivations. Frequently also problems outside of work.
Act how you would want them to act if the role would be reversed.👈👆👆👆👆👆👆
The Giants Diverse Coaching Staff Breaking all the Rules by Jared Diamond
By thinking unconventionally and bringing in sparring partners from all kinds of different backgrounds, the Giants created a powerhouse.
When Kapler became the Giants’ manager in November 2019 after two middling seasons at the helm of the Philadelphia Phillies, he set out to build a different kind of coaching staff. It would be young, diverse and filled with candidates who bring an innovative perspective to the game. Playing experience wouldn’t be required.
The Giants now have 15 people listed on their website under Kapler with the word “coach” or “director” in their titles, an unusually large number. Only four played in the big leagues. Four others never played professional baseball at all.
Good coaches, like good leaders, are learning and improving machines. They strive to get better and share that knowledge with their teams and organizations. That is who we want in the trenches with us.
Taira Uematsu embodies that philosophy as well as anybody. He grew up in Japan dreaming about playing professional baseball. When those hopes fizzled out in high school, he came to the U.S. barely knowing a word of English but desperate to find a way to stay around the game. His journey led him to the Giants organization, where he spent about 15 years toiling away as a bullpen catcher—an unglamorous, physically demanding and largely anonymous support role.
During the pandemic shutdown in 2020, the Giants started an organizational book club. One of the selections was Daniel Coyle’s “The Culture Code.” Reading it convinced Uematsu that he was capable of coaching. This past offseason, he approached Kapler about a promotion. He is now an assistant coach.
“What I learned in the last 15 years is that the best player is not the best coach,” Uematsu said. “Somebody who is willing to learn all the time and improve himself as a coach, those people are good at coaching.”
Mr. MoneyMustache in Outdoor Magazine
He asks two great questions in the article:
What things really make me happy in life, and which things bring me stress or unhappiness?
What is the most effective and least costly way to cut out some of that stress and bring more of the happiness into my typical week?
These kinds of questions (which sparring partners are great for) lead to answers as he writes below. We get to examine our life which could lead to a remixed version to better align our bigger picture with our day-to-day.
When you look at the bigger picture like this, you might realize that your commute to work or maybe even your entire job is stressful. So you find a way to shorten the commute or find a new job. You might wish you had more time to spend with friends or family, which might mean scheduling less into your days, focusing on quality rather than quantity.
On top of that, a proven formula for happiness and satisfaction is to emphasize production overconsumption. For example, volunteering to build trails is often more satisfying than walking on them. Creating an adventure by camping is more satisfying than passively consuming from a buffet at a resort. For me, building my own really nice house is more satisfying than buying an existing one and living in the luxury that somebody else created.
The other ideas that we added are ones that ring a strong bell for me. Doing is better than being passive (in a car or on a couch).
Drive less!!!!
We all have way more opportunities to do fun stuff than we have time. Put everything that you want to do on a list, then sort it by activities that are less expensive and more healthy, and prioritize those first. You’ll find that you never even get to the bottom to do the more expensive stuff, because life is too busy.
Stop watching TV, and use that time to read books or absorb podcasts on things that broaden your knowledge and give you new ideas on what to do with your free time. That time is your chance to get ahead—and make your life a lot more fun in the process.’
His point on the cost of activities reminded me of a Brian Eno quote I read in his diary last week.
Spending lots of money is often an admission of lack of research, preparation and imagination. - Brian Eno
Mike Dariano on Unlocking Restricted Access
When we are confused by actions we need to look at incentives, incentives, incentives.
Whenever I find myself flummoxed by someone’s action it’s a sign I don’t understand the incentives. Sometimes the incentives are satisfying the stakeholders. I like Cowen’s approach here: be curious and find the incentives.
🎧Things to Listen, See, and Watch 🎧
I tweeted out some of my favorite ideas from Brian Eno’s diary “A Year with Swollen Appendices”.
Krista Tippet talks with Kimberely Wilson about Whole Body Mental Health
We all owe our current reality and situations to what we experienced and grew up around. We need to see possibilities to make them realities.
Kimberely’s mom had MS leading to her focus on the brain and behavior.
There’s a way in which I feel like none of us really owns, entirely, our trajectories. You know, there’s no such thing as a self-made person. And if I had grown up in a family of musicians, I’m sure that I would be a concert pianist. Or if I’d grown up in a family of artists, I’m sure that it would’ve had an impact on my relationship to art, and I’d visit galleries more often, or something like that. But I grew up with this intimate awareness of brains that don’t work, I guess, or brains that aren’t working well, so that when I got into school and we were doing biology lessons, I understood things like myelination and neurodegeneration and motor neurons and this sort of stuff.
The vagus nerve is very very important for us.
So the vagus nerve, it’s technically the 10th cranial nerve, which means it’s a nerve that comes out of the brain, out of the skull. And it is this beautiful — I have an image of it in my book. It’s beautiful. “Wandering nerve,” and it’s called vagus from the Latin root of “vag-“ — vagabond, wandering, And it does wander. It wanders throughout your body. So it goes down the back of your throat, it loops up around the ears, crosses down behind the voice box, it connects into your heart, into your lungs, into your liver, into your stomach, into all of your major organs, before rounding out in the gut. So it’s this direct, physical relationship between the body and the brain, and I think the main — one of the most important things to understand is that most of the direction of information is going from the body, up. So it’s not simply that it’s about the brain telling the body what to do. The vagus nerve seems to be the main way in which the brain is getting an understanding of the internal conditions of the body, in order to interpret that and then to make a decision about a behavior.
This matters greatly for the emotions we feel.
And the reason that that’s so important, I think, is about understanding that relationship between that and our emotionality, because our emotionality is anchored in our bodies. And part of that is going to be about what your body is telling your brain about how the situational, the contextual information is being perceived and understood.
And this brings us back to the dualism, because we certainly think that for some people, their depression is largely driven by immune activation, or inflammation. It’s this contribution of the body — it’s not just about the way that you think or about unprocessed trauma.
Diet plays a key role in depression.
So what the epidemiological evidence shows us is that the more you adhere — generally, the more you adhere to a healthy diet — and “healthy” is really, broadly, we can just say a whole food diet, so whole grains, nuts, seeds, fish, leaner meats, fruits and vegetables, that kind of thing; non-industrial, whole foods — the lower your risk or the more protection you have from later development of depression, even when you’re controlling for things like income, family status, the type of job you have, and so forth.
Are the increasing issues with children driven by diet?
Those are brand-new, rapidly developing brains that aren’t getting the structural components required for good brain architecture and resilience. And so when we’re looking at these increasing rates of depression, in developmental disorders in children, in externalizing behaviors, in mood and affect disorders, and we’re looking around and we’re wondering why children seem to be so unwell and increasingly unwell, and we lay the blame at social media — which certainly does need to take some of the blame — and the various stresses that come with modern life, we must, I think, be thinking about the structural foundations. If we’re thinking almost about buildings, how strong are the foundations? If the stresses are going to come anyway, how strong are the foundations? And the foundations of a healthy brain lie in a healthy diet
Why we all need well-functioning brains.
In order to solve humanity’s problems, many as they are, what we need are well-functioning brains. And the big worry, for me and lots of people like me, who are looking at this research, is that the way that we’re living and the way that we’re eating is effectively and persistently undermining the quality of our brain architecture and, therefore, our ability to think and process and problem solve.
Scott Barry Kaufman interviews Todd Rose about Intelligence
Todd dropped out of high school and at the same time became a father. He ended up taking an honors class in college (because he asked to) and studying at Harvard.
It's funny you know you and I have very similar stories um And in my case you know I was a professor for quite a long time. I got my doctorate from Harvard but before that I was a high school dropout. And it's funny it's it's and that's what I say when I say a high school dropout I actually failed out with a 0.9 G. P. A. Which I kind of feel like now that like you have to work really hard to do that poorly.
We all contain jagged profiles. We need to match our skills and learning styles with what works for us. The current education system doesn’t do that very well.
You know I wrote about it in the end of average whether it's body size or mental abilities, people all have these jagged profiles meaning like so something like body size is not one dimensional right? We think of it that way. Small medium large extra large. It doesn't work that way really that's just a shortcut because of production constraints right? So everybody's on the high end on some aspects of like size is multidimensional and what's fascinating is is that those dimensions just don't correlate with each other. Like we like to think they do. So it means that you're gonna be high on some things in the middle on other things and on the low end on on other things right?
There is always a strategy that works for our jagged profiles. We don’t teach kids or people to find the strategy that works for them.
And it's it's it's again, it's not about me being smart, it's about recognizing that we all have jagged profiles and those jagged profiles have their good in some context pour in others. But there is always a strategy that can work for you and we don't teach kids that right? Like so, so I try something I don't do very well. Well, I'm not very good at it, right? And to me that's whether they meant it or not.
He wants to find ways to allow people to fulfill their entire potential. He asked to be in the honors program in college because it fit his learning style better.
And I went back in and he said listen tell me why you want to be in the honors program because I don't get it right. And so I explained to him what I've learned about myself and why I thought this was a good fit even though in truth I should have been in remedial classes in a lot of places right And he said look I can't let you in straight in but what I'll do is I'll ghive you provisional status and here's what I mean, you choose one honors class and if you do well, I'll let you take another one and we'll go from there. And so I chose wisely, I was like, okay, I gotta pick something. I really it was called plagues of the modern era. First of all, it almost made me vegan because I couldn't meet forever, but um I did really well, it was such a perfect fit. And so and so you just do this and then suddenly um again, I'm graduating as the honor student of the year. And and like for me it's like on paper you'd say, well obviously someone who literally literally had to take remedial math because I failed algebra three times in high school. And you know, why would you think honors would be a better fit?
We get perverse results when everything is a reading test.
Right? As soon as you reduce the variation on in the environment, it starts to make variation in biology look predictive. Right? So like for example, if I decide if I decide everything is a reading test, which that's most of school like then. And we know that people naturally vary in terms of reading ability.
Our goal should be to create environments of excellence for ourselves and others.
But to me, what I'm looking at is what if you look at it the other way and say if I believe everyone has the ability to be excellent at something and my job is to create the environment that cultivates that. So we all benefit from it. Then I would be trying to understand human variation, not from a selection process but from a design process. Right. How do I accommodate the widest range of variation possible?
💣Words of Wisdom💣
"When you can do the thing you're doing in your sleep, wake up! Go somewhere else!" - @stewartbrand
"Hope, like every virtue, is a choice that becomes a habit that becomes spiritual muscle memory. It's a renewable resource for moving through life as it is, not as we wish it to be. “ (Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise)
"An unfurling work in progress. We are perpetual works in progress, fumbling along the path, clambering for meaning." (Steve Brophy, Alight in the Lament)
"The ego,” Freud once wrote Jung, paying deference to what he felt were the greater powers of the superego and the id, “is like a clown in a circus, always trying to stick in its oar to make it look like it has something to do with what is going on” (Robert Kegan)
"It's a structural thing: when thinge are good, their structure - the balance of tension and release, light and dark, heaviness and lightness, earth and air, all those things - is obvious to me. If I'm not seeing that kind of structure, something's wrong." (Brian Eno)
"Of course, it is intolerable to have to work in the middle of somebody else’s mess. But that is because the subtle cues that the mess contains are all irrelevant. They are signposts for somebody else’s journey." (Tim Harford, Messy)
"I know of no one who is able to develop insight and compassion without a regular practice of quieting and watching the mind." (Margaret J. Wheatley, So Far From Home)
"Information is simply available. Knowledge in an emphatic sense, however, is a long and slow process. It displays an entirely different temporality. It matures." (Byung-Chul Han, The Expulsion of the Other)
"There are three opportunities to strike an opponent: before he attacks, during his attack, or after he attacks,” Bruce explained. “Jeet Kune Do means to intercept before he attacks—to intercept his movement, his thoughts, or his motive.” (Matthew Polly, Bruce Lee)
🙏Thanks for reading🙏
Who are your sparring partners? Where do you need to add some additional ones?
Shout out to all the folks who spar with me and we engage in that virtuous circle of helping each other grow.
Any thoughts or comments, please share!
Namaste,
Christian
Been making the rounds for some sparring session conversations including meeting up with Sherman last week.
🥊Why We Need to Find our Sparring Partners 🥊